10 Tips for Making Your Own Travel Photo Book

Choosing the right photos to include is often the most time-consuming aspect of creating a photo book. Start by creating a folder specifically for your photo book and copy your favourite travel images there so you can easily drag and drop them into your photo book once you begin. Aim to select high quality photos so they’ll look their best once printed. This means filtering out any shots that might be blurry or underexposed, and selecting images that are well composed, have a clear subject and help tell the story of your journey. 

The next step, once you have all your images ready to go, is choosing your photo book format and paper type. Although there’s no right or wrong choice here, for travel photo books, we love the Standard Landscape format as it’s ideal for showcasing a mixture of both portrait and landscape images along with text. Opting for lay-flat binding with photographic paper also means you’ll be able to showcase your favourite images across double page spreads with no loss of visibility down the centre of the spine. 

One thing that can help to give your photo book a nice uniform look is to group together certain photos based on the prominent colours they feature. For instance, you could have a few pages dedicated to photos that were taken around sunrise or sunset, a few pages for photos featuring beautiful blue skies and ocean views, or some featuring cityscapes and architectural photography. 

When creating the layout for your travel photo book, you can choose from a range of ready-made templates and themes to speed up the process or you could opt to get creative and make your own layout or photo collages. If you choose the second option, think about leaving some white space so your images stand out and make an impression. 

Since your travel photo book’s cover is the first thing anyone will see, it’s worth spending some time getting it right. Your cover design should be eye-catching but still minimal enough that it doesn’t distract from the title. Look for a cover design that inspires you or conveys that sense of excitement you get when setting out on a new journey, whether it’s a photo collage, a photo of the open road, or a map showing your journey’s start and end point. 

If you have any keepsakes from your travels, it can be nice to leave a few pages or spaces throughout your photo book blank so you can physically paste these in once the final version of your travel photo book has been delivered. Fun non-digital add-ins might include handwritten notes, journal entries, sketches, ticket stubs, postcards or anything else you may have picked up along the way to remind you of your adventures.